The (global) politics of Technology Assessment – discursive-deliberative or agonistic?

The dynamics of convergence of specific practices (e.g., responsible research and innovation [RRI], technology assessment [TA]) across research and innovation policies are frequently interrogated by STS scholarship. Progress itself has often been defined by its ability to make projects expand without changing their framing assumptions. This quality is “scalability” [and it refers to] the ability of a project to change scales smoothly without any change in project frames (Tsing 2015: 38). In this talk, I will explore the possible standardization of TA practices and knowledge norms and its consequences at a time when the TA community is considering that TA can and should go global beyond nation-specific practices to meet the current socio-technical challenges of our time.

Can TA practices be scaled up to reach and engage a global audience? Can there be a global TA organization? Given the normative and philosophical roots of TA that make it unique among the many other practices that aim to support decision making and public debate, the only sustainable answer to these questions forces us to consider TA’s relation to democracy. I will start by arguing that the politics and practices of scaling TA are matters of democratic politics, since there is no viable TA without a strong democratic life.

From this point, I will ask: What kind of democracy are TA practitioners committed to, and how has this shaped the approaches they have developed to support decision-making and public debate? What are the limits of these visions in terms of the insights and revitalization they can still bring to TA practices and democratic orders? With these questions in mind, I would like to explore the roots of TA in relation to democracy. Drawing on recent work (Delvenne and Parotte 2024), I will begin with a brief overview of four theories of democracy that I find relevant and useful for making sense of TA’s crucial role and activity in the tumultuous times that many democracies are currently experiencing. First, I will consider the theories of discursive and deliberative democracy developed by Benjamin Barber and Jürgen Habermas, which are often considered by the TA community to be at the core of TA’s rationales and methodologies (van Est/Brom 2012). I will then include the ideas of two authors who theorized agonistic models of democracy – Noortje Marres and Chantal Mouffe – whose approaches that value conflict and dissensus have somehow been neglected by the TA community and, to a large extent, by scholarly work on TA.

I will argue that the contribution of discursive and deliberative theories, while crucial, is now leading to an impasse from which a way out must be found. The successes of the model of democracy sought by Habermas and Barber remain mixed. All around, the framework of representative democracy is cracking and in need of deep repair given the widening gap between those who govern and those who are governed. As an institutional embodiment of democratic ideals translated into practice, if it is to continue to play a pioneering role, adapted to the contemporary challenges posed by the rapid rise of far-right extremism and epistemic ambiguity about the status of science, TA needs to renew its sources of theoretical inspiration.

I am not advocating a switch between discursive-deliberative and agonistic approaches. Instead, my intention is to blur the traditional distinctions between these models of democracy, leading to the conclusion that it is fruitful to consider the boundary between the two as not insurmountable, in theory as in practice. Identifying what I will call ‘disturbance zones’ at the intersection of these theories of democracy will allow me to consider the global politics of technology assessment. I will do so tentatively, guided by Anna Tsing’s conceptual lens, arguing that in the shadow of the zeitgeist of scalability, it is necessary to turn attention to the nonscalable as a spur to TA theory and practice.